In this podcast conversation from March 2010, Kevin Honeycutt discusses the importance of adding meta information (tags) to videos, photos, and other pieces of media uploaded to social networking sites like Ning networks. Kevin explains “tags are ways to see things.” He explains how important it is to understand and use tags in today’s networked, digital environment, and gives advice about how to balance the need to create rules or guidelines for tagging, but also leave the door wide enough so people are encouraged to contribute. Kevin also explains his passion for the FREE Art Snacks learning community, and how he has cultivated that vibrant learning community since 2007. If you know ANYONE interested in art, drawing, and/or creativity, they need to know about Art Snacks. Check out the podcast shownotes for links to referenced resources.

Dear Wes and Kevin, once again you’ve managed to effectively summarize best practices and give compelling reasons why someone should add tags to their work. It’s something I’ve been working on with my students as they are baby bloggers this year…and it is something that I needed an infusion of new approaches. I’m not as successful in getting kids to really want to do this.

I really struggle with this when I am working as the yearbook sponsor. I laughed when Kevin talked about uploading tons of images all with the file name of the camera pic. My yearbook staff is notorious for doing this and HATES to go back and tag even the names of the people in the pics. It’s critical because as we want to make sure that we have most people in the school represented in the yearbook, we need names. It also allows us to do find out who we’ve missed.

One of the things we’ve started doing is something called the Bucket List. That’s because we put the names of everyone in the school in a bucket (color coded by grade level) at the start of the year. Once we have that person in the book, we take the name out of the bucket and put it on a bulletin board. Then once a week, we pull out name(s) of the kids who still don’t have an image in the book and they are assigned to go and take some kind of candid for that students. It sort of works…and I think the better I get at managing it, the better they will become at doing it.

Again thanks for sharing your ideas and insights.

Leslie Raffelson

Thanks for this reminder. I think it is something important. I need to ask my kids to go back and name things. I like the idea of the Tag Team.